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81Aggression, Politeness, and Abstract AdversariesInformal Logic 33 (2): 238-262. 2013.Trudy Govier argues in The Philosophy of Argument that adversariality in argumentation can be kept to a necessary minimum. On her ac-count, politeness can limit the ancillary adversariality of hostile culture but a degree of logical opposition will remain part of argumentation, and perhaps all reasoning. Argumentation cannot be purified by politeness in the way she hopes, nor does reasoning even in the discursive context of argumentation demand opposition. Such hopes assume an idealized politene…Read more
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95The Authority of the Fallacies Approach to Argument EvaluationInformal Logic 30 (3): 279-308. 2010.Popular textbook treatments of the fallacies approach to argument evaluation employ the Adversary Method identified by Janice Moulton (1983) that takes the goal of argumentation to be the defeat of other arguments and that narrows the terms of discourse in order to facilitate such defeat. My analysis of the textbooks shows that the Adversary Method operates as a Kuhnian paradigm in philosophy, and demonstrates that the popular fallacies pedagogy is authoritarian in being unresponsive to the scho…Read more
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25Authority arguments in academic contexts in social studies and humanitiesOssa Conference Archive. 2011.In academic contexts the appeal to authority is a quite common but seldom tested argument, either because we accept the authority without questioning it, or because we look for alternative experts or reasons to support a different point of view. But, by putting ourselves side by side an already accepted authority, we often rhetorically manoeuvre to displace the burden of the proof to avoid the fear to present our opinions and to allow face saving.
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26The Need for Rhetorical Listening to Ground Scientific ObjectivityOssa Conference Archive. 2007.Recent work in feminist and postcolonial rhetoric demonstrates various meanings of silence. Listening rhetorically in order to comprehend silences is particularly difficult in scientific contexts, I argue, because the common ground for scientific discourse assumes a culture of disclosure. Rhetorical listening is also important to science because listening accounts for silence as well as disclosure, and so maximizes the diversity in recognized perspectives that provides scientific objectivity.
Areas of Specialization
| Epistemology |
| Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |
| 20th Century Philosophy |
| General Philosophy of Science |
Areas of Interest
| Epistemology |
| 20th Century Philosophy |
| Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |